


Mercy

by Ankhiale



Series: Making the Best of Things [15]
Category: Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-16
Updated: 2019-07-16
Packaged: 2020-06-29 11:39:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19829416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ankhiale/pseuds/Ankhiale
Summary: Everyone thinks Thom is insane. Alex knows better.Warning for some description of mental illness.





	Mercy

Everyone in court thinks Thom of Trebond is insane. Alex knows better: regardless of how weird he acts, Thom is perfectly sane. He just doesn’t give a damn what anyone thinks of him and has goals that the others, for some reason, find totally inexplicable.

Besides, Alex is the crazy one.

He’s known it for years, that his mind doesn’t work like other people’s, that there’s something _wrong_ about it at such a fundamental level that he can’t really fix it. People often seem slightly unreal to him - not that he doesn’t recognize them as real, but that he doesn’t instinctively recognize them as _people_ , as something other than more objects to be analyzed and accounted for, if ones capable of startling independence. See, even now, he’s thinking of them as things.

It doesn’t help that people are generally really predictable, moreso than most ever admit.

It gets bad enough, by the end of his page years, that he’s taken to reminding himself every morning and night, as he looks in his mirror, that other people matter too. He’s shocked and yet sort of not shocked that no one ever seems to realize that he’s faking much of his social interactions, not even his friends; it makes him wonder sometimes if everyone’s faking, at least some of the time, and he wonders if he’d even notice if they were. But “fake it ‘til you make it” is turning out to be a sound strategy for dealing with others, even if Alex sincerely doubts that the “make it” part will ever happen.

He stops fretting over his madness sometime during his squire years, and he’s not sure when, but eventually he figures out why: Roger. But Alex doesn’t figure that out until well after Thom’s knighted and has single-handedly derailed Roger’s plot.

Roger had taken Alex on as a squire first, while Thom was just an ornery page; he’d brought Alex in on his plotting and Alex, much to his own surprise, hadn’t … cared. He hadn’t cared. His master was plotting to kill the king and queen, to kill Jon, and Alex … hadn’t cared. Had, instead, only been intrigued. Say what you want about treason, but it’s not boring.

He hadn’t thought to wonder about that at the time. He’d just been strangely grateful for having something interesting to do, something that distracted him from his own mind.

He’d warned Roger, about taking on Thom. He’d _warned_ him. But there really wasn’t anyone else who could safely train the lad, and every god in heaven knew Thom really, _really_ needed to be trained before he caused another disaster. So after Alex was knighted and Thom became a squire, Roger took him on and took him to Carthak, to try and shape him into a semi-competent adult, and Roger left Alex behind to manage his affairs in Tortall.

Alex was running the whole conspiracy practically by himself for four years, and he has never, ever told Jon that. He suspects he doesn’t have to, but in this he’s too much of a coward to find out.

When Thom nearly murders Roger not even an hour after being knighted, it’s all Alex can do not to say, _I told you so._

Roger, sitting in Alex’s room that night and still shaking like a leaf, glares at Alex like he heard the thought anyway.

“What do we do now?” Alex asks instead.

There’s silence for a long minute.

“Maybe we don’t do anything,” Delia says.

Roger looks between them, stares into the middle distance, then closes his eyes and takes a long, slow breath. He pulls himself together and forces his hands to stop shaking. Eyes still closed, he nods sharply, once.

The door swings open behind him, and all three of them jerk around. Alex knows for a certainty that he locked it, and Roger definitely warded it, and that tells Alex exactly who their uninvited guest is even before he lays eyes on the man.

Neither locks nor wards ever seem to stop Thom for long.

“Maybe you do something worthwhile instead,” he says, and for once he’s dropped his nutty mask and Alex sees, fully, the serious, somber, canny man beneath it. Delia smiles, one of her rare genuinely fond ones, and Alex knows suddenly that this is the Thom she’s known all along.

Roger’s staring at his former student, at the man who’d been inches from executing him for treason, but who’d instead inexplicably extended him mercy. Roger’s staring, scarcely breathing, actually weighing Thom’s words, and Alex realizes that Thom has just inexplicably extended them all mercy again.

Alex doesn’t know what counts as a worthwhile thing, but maybe he can find out.


End file.
